No “happy new year” for Israelis tonight
These New Year's fireworks are definitely *not* in Jerusalem.
No, no. That’s not what we mean.
With God’s help (and yours), all of Israel will have a peaceful and happy 2010, but we’re referring to the world-wide “holiday” that begins tonight at midnight — New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. It may seem strange but Israelis don’t really celebrate it.
The first year SFI lived in Israel, I found myself sitting on a Jerusalem bus one Thursday night. I absent-mindedly looked down at my watch and took in the number of the date: “31.” There were only a handful of other passengers and all seemed simply as pre-occupied as I was with getting home already.
Ten p.m. on December 31 in Jerusalem — and nothin’. No festivities, just another night. (Never one to enjoy enforced-party-rules, I felt rather a sense of liberation at it.)
Not “our” New Year
The main reason that Israelis don’t celebrate Jan. 1 is because it’s not our new year. The Jewish calendar’s new year begins on Rosh Hashanah, the first day of the Hebrew month of Tishrei (which usually falls in September or October). So January 1 may be the beginning of lu’azi year(secular calendar year), but our year started a few months ago.
Hard to see but the colored flowers are wishing Israelis a happy Passover.
Israel’s national calendar follows the Biblical Jewish calendar: Newspapers print both the Jewish and secular dates, and the annual cycle follows Jewish holidays: So bottles of Coke don’t say “Happy Holidays” in December, but rather wish Israelis a “Happy new year” in the fall and a “Happy Passover” in the spring. Days of the week correspond to the Sabbath: Sunday is, literally, “the first day (from the Sabbath)”; Wednesday “the fourth day (from the Sabbath)”; and Saturday is–you guessed it–”the Sabbath.”
This is not to say that the Jewish state isn’t fully compliant with the calendar the rest of the world uses: Jewish dates are…
Read More » Comments (4) »Thursday, December 31st, 2009 at 5:48 PM | Stand For Israel
Everything you want to know about the Arab-Israel conflict, but are afraid to ask (lest Hamas blow you up)
If ever anyone wanted to see the yawning chasm of morality between Israel and, say, Iran (or pretty much any of its neighbors), just read on…
It was a year ago today that Israel launched an incursion into Gaza to stop the rocket-fire that Hamas had been raining down on Israeli towns for several years. However one views that operation, the fact is that there sure are a lot less rockets falling on Israeli civilians now than a year ago.
Taking advantage of Israel’s free and open society, hundreds of Israeli Arabs (that is, citizens of Israel who happen to be Arab) and what the media calls “left-wing activists” (that is, citizens of Israel who happen to have taken leave of their senses) rallied near Israel’s border with Gaza. They were protesting the continued closure of most of the border crossings.
(Are we the only ones who don’t understand why it’s considered unreasonable for a country to not want an open border with an entity sworn to its destruction? Under any other circumstances–meaning, any country other than Israel–wouldn’t that be called “suicidal”?)
As if the, er, somewhat hostile nature of this gathering wasn’t already apparent, the group was addressed (by cellphone) by Israel’s good friend, Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas. Mr. Haniyeh cheerily informed the assembled that, one day, they will all “meet at the Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem, which will remain Arab and Muslim.”
Clearly, the image here is one of peaceful co-existence.
Speaking of peaceful, take a moment to imagine what would happen to such an assembly in any Palestinian area during which some Jewish leader referred to looking forward to Israeli control of Gaza City or Nablus. Not such a peaceful image, eh?
If ever anything should give “moral clarity,” that’s it.
Comments (2) »Thursday, December 31st, 2009 at 9:24 AM | Stand For Israel
Israeli magician chilling out – for world record
The 8-ton ice cube sitting on a stage in Tel Aviv's Rabin Sqaure (ISRANET)
An Israeli magician is in the middle of an attempt to break a (rather odd) world record: He’s standing in an 8-ton ice cube parked in a big public display in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square.
Din looks out from the cube (ISRANET)
Chezi Din, 29, needs to stay in the cube for 64 hours, and plans to emerge at midnight on Thursday. If he’s successful, Din will break American magician David Blaine’s record, which he set in 2000 when he spent 58 hours in an ice cube in New York’s Times Square.
Besides our usual brow furrowing over why people do this, SFI is wondering how much this stunt cost — in an attempt to address Israel’s serious water crisis, the Israeli water authority recently jacked up water prices in the last year and are set to hike them even further in 2010.
(All photos are courtesy of ISRANET.)
Din from above. (ISRANET)Din being lifted into the cube. (ISRANET)
The magician himself, getting ready to go into the cube. (ISRANET)
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 at 2:53 PM | Stand For Israel
A how-to guide to boycotting Israel: It ain’t easy!
A classic: Those advocating boycotting Israel to protest one thing or another have quite a lot to keep track of!
Comments (0) »Monday, December 21st, 2009 at 11:15 AM | Stand For Israel
The appropriate reaction to terror: Sderot turns missiles — into a menorah!
Sderot, the southern Israeli town that’s been battered by thousands of Kassam rockets launched from the nearby Gaza Strip, has found yet another way of making clear their unbroken spirits: Led by a local yeshiva, residents turned hollowed-out pieces of rockets that hit the city into a huge public menorah, which they’ve been lighting each night of Hanukkah.
- Yeshiva students lighting the menorah made from Kassam rockets, which was placed on top of the yeshiva. (Courtesy David Cohen, Yeshivat Hesder Sderot)
This turning around–using something intended to harm them as a means of proclaiming the Jewish people’s enduring connection to God–is a particularly Jewish response: When Syrians used to shell kibbutzes in the Galilee region in the early years of the state, the Zionist response was always to build more. Israelis call this response “dafka” — a word with a number of meanings, but in this context, it means doing the exact opposite of what someone’s trying to make you do.
Not for nothing does the Bible repeatedly call the nation of Israel a “stiff-necked people.” Sometimes–unfortunately–the label refers to the nation being led astray, but the same quality is what gives the Jewish people the resilience to cling to their ways and their God. They do this in the face of far powerful opponents, as in the case of the yeshiva students who defeated the far more powerful Syrian-Greek empire, who established the festival of Hanukkah. And they do this today as a single country singled out and piled upon by dozens of other countries who can’t accept that they exist, and they do this fighting terrorist foes who wage war against them in the style of the Biblical Amalek, who attacked the weak and most defenseless. The terrorists’ blatant disregard for the sanctity of life–even of their own people–makes it that much more difficult (and that much more imperative) for nations of conscience to fight them.
That imperative brings us back to…
Read More » Comments (2) »Friday, December 18th, 2009 at 4:00 PM | Stand For Israel
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